Jaiwant Rangi, MD, FACEEndocrinologist | Founder, Lower The Dose® | Speaker

Beyond Survival: Understanding Stress, Anxiety, and the Biological Fight-or-Flight Response

14 May 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:53

In this segment, Dr. Jaiwant Rangi explains how chronic stress can push individuals into a persistent "survival mode," characterized by withdrawal, heightened emotional reactivity (easy crying, anxiety), overactive adrenal output, and narrowed cognitive bandwidth. He emphasizes that remaining in this state is detrimental and signals the need for self‑work to exit the mode. Rangi then links this chronic stress response to the body's acute threat system—the hypothalamic‑pituitary axis—that orchestrates the fight‑or‑flight hormonal cascade when faced with immediate danger (e.g., falling, predator attack). The talk underscores the importance of recognizing these physiological signals and actively managing stress to prevent constant activation of the threat response.

Chapters

What I experience with myself and what I experience with some of my friends is sometimes the stress becomes so much around you that you withdraw and you're constantly in just a survival mode. And if that happens, then you have easy crying, you get very anxious, your adrenal gland is already overkicking, and your bandwidth is really tight at that time. So we need to not be in that survival mode all the time. If you see yourself in that, that means we need to work on ourselves and understand how do we get out of that so we're not under constantly feeling under the pressure. Now This is the same system that helps us take care of ourselves when we are under threat. So if you're about to fall, or if you have an animal running at you, or any kind of, you know, predator, or any situation where you need to fight or flight, this hormone system, the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, helps us take care of ourselves at that time.